Tuesday, August 19, 2008
News / Chicagoland Drinking age coming down?
Posted by Whet Moser on 08.19.08 at 11:06 AM
I think there's something to be said in the abstract for bringing the drinking age in line with the voting and military age, but lowering it to combat binge drinking seems uncreative and naive. If you're looking for the causes of binge drinking, here's a perceptive take:
"You think it's a coincidence that it's in college that most Americans do their most serious falling-down drinking and drugging and reckless driving and rampant fucking and mindless general Dionysian-type reveling? It's not. They're adolescents, and they're terrified, and they're dealing with their terror in a distinctively American way. Those naked boys hanging upside down out of their frat-house's windows on Friday night are simply trying to get a few hours' escape from the stuff that any decent college has forced them to think about all week."
--David Foster Wallace, "Laughing With Kafka"
Comments (2)
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Lowering the drinking age would help colleges address binge drinking by their younger students, because they'd be able to deal with it as a binge drinking problem, not a legal problem.
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making binge drinking legal makes it easier to treat it as a public safety issue. I know that my high school's medical staff fretted over every gesture made by the administration that forced students to push their getting fucked up ness further underground--and, hence, further from the ability of medical professionals to help them when they needed it. Additionally, they suspected that binge drinking was encouraged by the clandestine nature of drinking (not a lot of time to get fucked up because you're in hiding => get fucked up in more dangerous ways). I'm not so sure about that, but I can see the logic.
